6 - Private Memory

Summary

Chapter 6 examines the private memory of ex-servicemen who fought in the Middle East and Macedonia. It uses a source not meant to influence public opinion at all: scrapbooks. This chapter makes two arguments. First, it argues that scrapbooks were spaces of private memory and, to borrow from Pierre Nora, sites of memory. British and Dominion soldiers who had photographed the war and spent most of their service in the Middle East and Macedonia had to remember the war differently. Their campaigns bore little resemblance to the conflict on the Western Front. Ex-servicemen used scrapbooks as a way of actively constructing a past that was both recognisable and acceptable to them. Some ex-servicemen pictured the war as a relentless struggle against the Ottomans or Bulgarians, and the harsh climatic and environmental conditions of the Middle East and Macedonia. Others pictured the war as an exciting episode of travel. Others still pictured the war in chronological order, slotting their personal experience of the war into the narrative. While publicly, in memoirs, ex-servicemen made a number of claims that were meant to compete with the Western Front, privately, in scrapbooks, ex-servicemen focused almost entirely on travel, tourism, and camaraderie.